The US
Using Satellites to Spy on American Citizens and News
OrganizationsNSA Collects
'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former
AnalystPBS - Video

Judy Woodruff sits down with two former NSA officials who blew
the whistle on what they said were abuses at the NSA, along with
that agency’s former inspector general, to talk about whether
that secretive agency is recording all domestic calls in the
U.S.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And
we pick up on the continuing fallout from the
revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Last night, we debated the role of the Foreign
Surveillance Intelligence court, which approves the
government's requests to gather intelligence information
on Americans.

Tonight, we have a conversation with three former NSA
officials, a former inspector general and two NSA
veterans who blew the whistle on what they say were
abuses and mismanagement at the secret government
intelligence agency.

William Binney worked at the NSA for over three decades as a
mathematician, where he designed systems for collecting and
analyzing large amounts of data. He retired in 2001. And
Russell Tice had a two-decade career with the NSA where he
focused on collection and analysis. He says he was fired in
2005 after calling on Congress to provide greater protection
to whistle-blowers.

He
claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government
officials and the news media 10 years ago.

RUSSELL TICE,
former National Security Agency analyst: The United States
were, at that time, using satellites to spy on American
citizens. At that time, it was news organizations, the State
Department, including Colin Powell, and an awful lot of
senior military people and industrial types.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So,
this is the early 2000s.

RUSSELL TICE:
This was in 2002-2003 time frame. The NSA were targeting
individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme
Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito's targeting information
for his phones and his staff and his family.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Bill
Binney, what was your sense of who was being targeted and
why they were being targeted? And what was being collected,
in other words?

WILLIAM BINNEY,
former National Security Agency technical leader: Well, I
wasn't aware of specific targeting like Russ was. I just saw
the inputs were including hundreds of millions of records of
phone calls of U.S. citizens every day. So it was virtually
-- there wasn't anybody who wasn't a part of this collection
of information.

So,
virtually, you could target anybody in this country you
wanted.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both
Binney and Tice suspect that today, the NSA is doing more
than just collecting metadata on calls made in the U.S. They
both point to this CNN interview by former FBI
counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente days after the Boston
Marathon bombing. Clemente was asked if the government had a
way to get the recordings of the calls between Tamerlan
Tsarnaev and his wife.

TIM CLEMENTE,
former FBI counterterrorism agent: On the national security
side of the house, in the federal government, you know, we
have assets. There are lots of assets at our disposal
throughout the intelligence community and also not just
domestically, but overseas. Those assets allow us to gain
information, intelligence on things that we can't use
ordinarily in a criminal investigation.

All
digital communications are -- there's a way to look at
digital communications in the past. And I can't go into
detail of how that's done or what's done. But I can tell you
that no digital communication is secure.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Tice
says after he saw this interview on television, he called
some former workmates at the NSA.

RUSSELL TICE:
Well, two months ago, I contacted some colleagues at NSA. We
had a little meeting, and the question came up, was NSA
collecting everything now? Because we kind of figured that
was the goal all along. And the answer came back. It was,
yes, they are collecting everything, contents word for word,
everything of every domestic communication in this country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Both
of you know what the government says is that we're
collecting this -- we're collecting the number of phone
calls that are made, the e-mails, but we're not listening to
them.

WILLIAM BINNEY:
Well, I don't believe that for a minute. OK?

I
mean, that's why they had to build Bluffdale, that facility
in Utah with that massive amount of storage that could store
all these recordings and all the data being passed along the
fiberoptic networks of the world. I mean, you could store
100 years of the world's communications here. That's for
content storage. That's not for metadata.

Metadata if you were doing it and putting it into the
systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room
for the world. That's all the space you need. You don't need
100,000 square feet of space that they have at Bluffdale to
do that. You need that kind of storage for content.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So,
what does that say, Russell Tice, about what the government
-- you're saying -- your understanding is of what the
government does once these conversations take place, is it
your understanding they're recorded and kept?

RUSSELL TICE:
Yes, digitized and recorded and archived in a facility that
is now online. And they're kind of fibbing about that as
well, because Bluffdale is online right now.

And
that's where the information is going. Now, as far as being
able to have an analyst look at all that, that's impossible,
of course. And I think, semantically, they're trying to say
that their definition of collection is having literally a
physical analyst look or listen, which would be
disingenuous.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But
the government vehemently denies it is recording all
telephone calls. Robert Litt is the general counsel in the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He recently
spoke at the Brookings Institution.

ROBERT LITT,
NSA general counsel: We do not indiscriminately sweep up and
store the contents of the communications of Americans or of
the citizenry of any country. We do collect metadata,
information about communications, more broadly than we
collect the actual content of communications, but that's
because it is less intrusive than collecting content and in
fact can provide us information that helps us more narrowly
focus our collection of content on appropriate foreign
intelligence targets.

But it
simply is not true that the United States government is
listening to everything said by the citizens of any country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Joel
Brenner, who was the NSA's inspector general and then senior
legal counsel, says the intelligence agency obeys the law
and the directions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
court.

JOEL BRENNER,
former NSA inspector general: It's really important to
understand that the NSA hasn't done anything, as I
understand it and from all I know, that goes one inch beyond
what it's been authorized to do by a court.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So,
tell us, how extensive is the NSA's collection of data on
American citizens, on their phone calls, on their e-mails,
on their use of the Internet?

JOEL BRENNER:
This the program only involves telephony metadata, not
e-mails, not geographic location information.

The
idea that NSA is keeping files on Americans, as a general
rule, just isn't true. There's no basis for believing that.
The idea that NSA is compiling dossiers on people the way J.
Edgar Hoover did in the '40s and '50s or the way the East
German police did, as some people allege, that's just not
true.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well,
we have been talking to a couple of former NSA employees and
one of the allegations they make is that it's not just
collecting this metadata on telephone conversations; it's
recording those conversations and it's storing them and
keeping them for possible future use.

JOEL BRENNER:
I think you're talking about Mr. Tice and Mr. Binney.

Mr.
Binney hasn't been at the agency since 2001. Mr. Tice hasn't
been at the agency since 2005. They don't know what's going
on inside the agency.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Another
allegation we heard from them, from Mr. Tice, is that back
as of the time before he left the NSA in the early 2000s,
that there was spying going on, on news organizations, on
Supreme Court justices, on presidential candidates, then
Senator Barack Obama, on military leaders, top generals in
the army.

JOEL BRENNER:
Mr. Tice made the allegations you have just indicated having
to do with the period before 2005, eight years ago. They're
just coming out now. I wonder why.

The
farther he gets from the period when he could have known
what he was talking about, the more fanciful his allegations
have become.

JOEL BRENNER:
We have turned intelligence into a regulated industry in a
way that none of our allies, even in Europe, have done.

We
have all three branches of government now involved in
overseeing the activities of the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and
our other intelligence apparatus. This is an enormous
achievement.

MAN:
Government has gone too far in the name of security, that
the Fourth Amendment has been bruised.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Last
week, one oversight proposal in Congress aimed at preventing
the NSA from collecting date on phone calls was narrowly
defeated, but some members are vowing to press for
additional restrictions on the investigative agency.

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